My students in the South Bronx do not want to take a bus to Staten Island. They do not want their school to become a magnet school, because they said, 'what about everyone else?' And they don't necessarily have an interest in changing the entire composition of their neighborhood for integration to happen. They don't believe in a lot of the models of integration that they've seen replicated around the United States.

If you're a young tech type looking at what new solution might sweep over and remake the K-12 landscape, it's not clear you'd see charters as an obvious candidate. How enthusiastic do you think Silicon Valley VCs might be about a product that had captured only 5 percent of market share after a quarter-century?

If you need something to take your mind off of last week's election results, or to focus your mind on one of the worlds we live in, you might want to check out Moonlight. A glowing NYT review (‘Moonlight’: Is This the Year’s Best Movie?) describes the film as being in part about "drug abuse, mass incarceration and school violence." But it's about so much more. Some of the key moments of the film take place at/during/after school, and you might think of the film as a version of Richard Linklater's "Boyhood" if the main character was young, poor, black, and gay.

Wall Street must not be allowed to hijack public education in Massachusetts. We must defeat Massachusetts Ballot Question 2. This is Wall Street’s attempt to line their own pockets while draining resources away from public education at the expense of low-income, special education students, and English-language learners.

Having had the chance to read an early copy of Lucinda Rosenfeld's new book, CLASS, last weekend, I wanted to be sure to recommend it to you as quickly as possible -- even though you may not be able to get a hold of a copy for a little while longer and despite the fact that I hope to interview Rosenfeld about her novel in the next few days.

[This happens all the time when neighborhoods gentrify, and is so predictable (and often upsetting to many of those involved) that I long ago proposed that it would be smart to change federal education funding to ease the pain for these schools whose poverty rates are plummeting (and also that there should be someone in charge of school gentrification in districts like Chicago, DC, and NYC).]

Of course, there's another school a few blocks over that's already flipped, demographically and otherwise, and is an appealing option for parents who are deeply concerned (or wildly over-anxious) about their offspring's academic and life success.

There's just one catch: the only families that are supposed to send their children to that school are those who live nearby (or used to) or can find some other way of wheedling their way in.

In telling this ripped-from-the-headlines tale, Rosenfeld does a great job detailing the families and feelings that accompany Brooklyn gentrifiers, and the tradeoffs involved in making individual versus collective decisions. There are also some fantastic misunderstandings, hilarious sendups (of Success Academy, among other things), and interesting reflections on what it's like to be white, guilty, anxious, and altruistic in alternating moments.

This is not a deep policy book, or even always entirely serious in terms of how it addresses education issues. But the issues it raises are serious underneath the satire, and the dynamics among parents, teachers, and children seem fairly realistic. Think of it as the guilty pleasure version of Nikole Hannah-Jones' NYT Sunday Magazine piece about how she chose a school for her child, or a schools-focused satire along the lines of The Corrections.

At times, I found myself wishing that Rosenfeld had taken the satire even further, out to the ridiculous edges where Gary Shteyngart and others go, with crossing guards checking children's home addresses as they wave them across the street, but I still found CLASS smart, enjoyable, and easy to recommend for a certain kind of schools-obsessed reader. Maybe you know someone?

This Netflix documentary "Thirteenth" isn't specifically focused on education, and doesn't address residential segregation nearly as much as it should (another kind of imprisonment, right?), but is still important and worth watching.

Just imagine being at a school where you sit down, get your education, you get back up, go home, next thing you know you brought bedbugs from school to your home... Just imagine being at a school where your teachers are all sick and tired, and they’re acting like they’re not able to teach because they’re not getting paid for what they do.

According to the Huffington Post, the new recommendations are "the strongest that DSC member organizations ― groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund ― have ever made collectively on the issue of school policing." The campaign is active in 27 states and claims 100 city and state member groups including the NAACP LDEF.

What's been left out so far is the tension between teachers' understandable concerns about classroom safety and order and advocates' understandable concerns about over-policing of schools.

According to EdWeek, the National Association of School Resource Officers "largely agreed with the federal guidance" but has not so far as I know endorsed the #CounselorsNotCops campaign. Nor has the NEA or AFT commented on the campaign.

Conflicting views over the benefits of police in schools came up in Chicago in April, when a Chicago Teachers Union-organized protest event included a #BlackLivesMatter calling for the removal of the police from city schools.

As reporting by DNAInfo ('F The Police' Speaker At Teacher Rally Not With CPS, But Union Takes Heat), activist Page May slammed the Chicago police and anyone associated with them. Just before her, union head Karen Lewis had praised the police.

"The CTU keeps acting like they are on our side, but then Karen Lewis refuses to say cops need to get out of schools," May said in the DNAInfo story. "Until [the Chicago Teachers Union] come out explicitly opposed to cops in schools, I don't think we are fighting on the same side."

The Seattle Times has also reported about the challenges some schools and districts have found in trying to rethink their school discipline policies. One story (Highline district struggles with fallout after limiting student suspensions), focusing on the related issue of school suspensions, reports that roughly 200 teachers have left the district in the past few months, many of them in reaction to the "elimination" of out of school suspensions, and the local teachers union president has flagged the turnover as a sign of major trouble looming.

Some social justice advocacy groups like the NAACP and #BlackLivesMatter may find common cause with classroom teachers and unions over prioritizing neighborhood schools and limiting "privatization" of education, but the Dignity In Schools campaign highlights the tensions that quickly emerge in other areas.

For practical and political reasons, classroom teachers and their unions are likely to be extremely reluctant about endorsing a move to remove police officers from schools.

Why so? Fear is one obvious reason. (Here's a cameraphone video said to be depicting a teacher and student fighting in a Philadelphia school.) At a more ideological level, teachers unions and police unions often try to work together at the local level, and as the Chicago incident reveals they can be reluctant to disagree publicly.

Still, there's much we don't know. What do the NEA, AFT, and National Association of School Resource Officers have to say about the Dignity In Schools campaign? What does the Obama administration say? And what about Clinton and Trump?

A recent PDK International poll reported that American's don't like it when schools get closed. They much prefer troubled schools get new leadership and/or staff. Eighty-four percent of the public prefers fixing struggling schools while just 14 percent want to close them.

But school closings, while they can be traumatic for students and educators who have remained at a school, aren't as common as you may think -- and even when they happen they don't necessarily mean a building is being shuttered. As noted in this recent opinion piece, the "nuclear" option happens only 1-2 percent of the time, usually after an all-hands-on-deck effort to turn things around and/or dwindling enrollment.

According to the NCES Fast Facts page, roughly 1,-2,000 of the nation's 99,000 schools have been closed over the years, fluctuating from a low of 1,2000 to a high of 2,200. And of course schools being closed doesn't necessarily mean that a school building is being shuttered. New schools are opened on the same site, or other schools within the same facility are enlarged.

Less than a dozen days from now, DC's long-serving chancellor is riding off into the sunset. But not before she answers some questions from us. As you can see in Kaya Henderson: The Exit Interview.

In her years heading the DCPS, Henderson played a complicated role in the wake of her predecessor, Michelle Rhee, whose tactics and philosophy were controversial. She has restored some semblance of peace among classroom teachers, continued pursuing many of Rhee’s strategies, and developed her own initiatives.

Henderson is a strong proponent of mayoral control (rather than independent school boards) but not a wild-eyed charter enthusiast. She’s not inclined to make racial integration a top priority over quality schools. And she’s proud of what she has helped to accomplish (some suburban parents are now faking their addresses to get their kids into DC public schools!), but she knows there is a long way to go.

Click the link above to hear Henderson's surprising thoughts on charter schools, racial integration, predecessor Michelle Rhee, dealing with critics, and the best and worst parts of the job.

Fans of high-quality nonfiction and those concerned about education and segregation should check out Matthew Desmond's pretty amazing book, Evicted, out earlier this year.

Focusing on the lives of poor white and black residents of one midsized city (Milwaukee), but making a national case, Desmond shows why poor people tend to move more often, but largely stay within confined geographic areas.

"There is an enormous amount of pain and poverty in this rich land,’ argues American sociologist Desmond in this brilliant book about housing and the lives of eight families in Milwaukee. (Via The Guardian)

The educational impacts of children whose families are moving frequently aren't the focus of the book, but they're ever-present: Lost sleep, changes of schools, going hungry, lack of heat or electricity, and constant worry. Families with children are much more likely to be evicted, notes this Mother Jones article.

The book also shows how academics and policymakers have missed much of what's going on by focusing on relatively small parts of the problem (federal housing vouchers and public housing) rather than larger ones (the private market) most poor renters inhabit.

Last but not least, Evicted shows that it's not just slumlords who are culpable for the deplorable, exploitative situation. The legal system, law enforcement, and even social support agencies all play a role in creating and perpetuating things -- and tolerating what's clearly intolerable.

This NYT map and accompanying story (Here’s Where They Went) shows the 231 towns and cities where the 10,000 Syrian refugees accepted into the United States have been settled over the past four years.

These numbers are tiny compared to what other nations are doing currently or what the US has done in the past with Cuban and Vietnamese refugees, points out the Times.

Big cities like NYC, Chicago, and LA haven't been among the leaders compared to affordable mid-sized citeis. "Boise, Idaho, has accepted more refugees than New York and Los Angeles combined; Worcester, Mass., has taken in more than Boston."

"The suit claims district administrators routinely sent older refugee students to a "disciplinary school" that subjected them to bullying, intense security protocols and an accelerated learning program that runs counter to conventional wisdom on the subject."

On PBS last night, a segment about a small seven year-old program in Chicago that attempts to prepare teachers (mostly white) for kids and communities they're likely to teach in (mostly black and brown) -- including a cross-cultural homestay program. Roughly half of Chicago teachers are white, while less than 10 percent of Chicago students are.

Two years after the death of Mike Brown is as good a time as any to point to remember a few important parts of the story of the Ferguson teen who was killed on this day in 2014.

We all probably remember that he he had graduated from high school three months early -- and that his graduation was not an unremarkable accomplishment.

It's less widely known that his mother, Lezley McSpadden, was among many teens who had been bused to school as part of a state desegregation program. According to a ProPublica story, she attended school in affluent Ladue.

But perhaps the most important thing to remember is how she responded in one interview, demonstrating frustration, despair, and anger that few of us will ever feel:

Most of the attention on the Movement for Black Lives' agenda, released earlier this week, focused on the call for reparations and other agenda items.

However, a little-noted part of the comprehensive agenda was its education section, which calls for "An End to the Privatization of Education and Real Community Control by Parents, Students and Community Members of Schools Including Democratic School Boards and Community Control of Curriculum, Hiring/Firing, and Discipline Policies."

Some highlight quotes:

*Privatization strips Black people of the right to self-determine the kind of education their children receive.

*Using mayoral control and state takeover, they impose their experimental, market-based approach to school reform.

*The education crises plaguing most of our public school districts are the result of corporate-controlled, state-sanctioned and federally-funded attacks to reverse Brown v. Board of Education, and create a desuetude discrimination and educational apartheid that must be challenged and overthrown.

*Their aims are to undermine Black democracy and self-determination, destroy organized labor, and decolor education curriculum, while they simultaneously overemphasize Standardized Testing, and use school closures to disproportionately disrupt access to education in Black communities.

The authors of this section include Jonathan Stith (Alliance for Educational Justice), Hiram Rivera (Philadelphia Student Union), and Chinyere Tutashinda (Center for Media Justice). According to an Tweet from Stith, "A squad of Black education justice parent & youth organizers [was] present as well." The resources provided for this agenda include the Every Student Succeeds Act Explained, AROS Demands Memo, and Journey For Justice.

In case it isn't clear, this call for elected school boards, an end to privatization, and a pullback from foundations like Gates and Broad is very much a reform critic's view of what needs to be done -- not at all a reformers' vision.

Or, as The American Prospect's Rachel Cohen put it, "There are some high-profile Teach for America alums in Black Lives Matter, but the #Vision4BlackLives platform calls for the program's end."

As such, this is the second time in recent weeks that we're reading about reform groups seeming to have been outflanked by their critics. The earlier instance was the development of the DNC party platform, which included amendments from Randi Weingarten and others that called for similar things. (You could also include the release of stolen DNC emails in which campaign officials urge against mention of Common Core.)

It's also an early indication of where the larger Black Lives Matter movement might be headed on education issues, which has been until now a murky thing to understand. There are several TFA alumni among the leaders of the movement, but the movement has also partnered with teachers unions in places like Chicago (where a BLM activist surprised union leaders by denouncing the police union).

However, there are areas in which the movement's agenda would seem to go along with the priorities of many reform groups -- and put them in conflict with organized labor. Some quoted highlights:

*Put a moratorium on all out of school suspensions.

*Remove police from schools and replace them with positive alternatives to discipline and safety.

*Inequitable funding at the school district, local and state level leave most public schools — where poor communities of color are the majority — unable to provide adequate and high quality education for all students, criminalizing and targeting Black students through racist zero-tolerance discipline policies.

*Key stakeholders, such as parents, teachers, and students are left out of the decision making process.

*Create Community Schools that have wrap-around services for students and community members as a turnaround model instead of closing schools or charterization.

It's also well worth noting that this document, released by a group calling itself the Movement for Black Lives (aka #Vision4BlackLives), may not represent the larger movement's education agenda, or the focal point of BLM efforts on education.

Last night on Twitter there was some disagreement about whether folks like Diane Ravitch qualify as "social justice" advocates. Ditto for school reform advocates like, say, Arne Duncan.

What I learned from the discussion was that people probably have very different notions about what it means to come at improving schools from a social justice perspective. For reform critics like Ravitch, opposing approaches that disempower classroom teachers or put pressure on traditional schools feels like social justice. For reform advocates like Duncan giving parents choices and making schools accountable for results feels like social justice.

Eager as they might be to claim the mantle of social justice advocacy, my sense is that both sides are wrong, and that the things that they spend most of their time advocating for are not the things that social justice advocates would prioritize for children and communities of color who most need better schools.

It's important to note that changes to education are not central to the current #BlackLivesMatter movement that embodies social justice advocacy in the current era. When education does come up, things like more charters, school desegregation, teacher empowerment, accountability, and student loans are not priority items.

So what would a social justice education agenda look like? Here's a highly imperfect guess at some of the priorities that might be highlighted. There's got to be a better version of this somewhere, but it's a start:

As I read it, this piece in The New Yorker (Pale Fire) suggests that the current conflict over education reform is in many ways the playing out of long-simmering white-on-white class conflicts.

If so, this would suggest that focusing narrowly on social justice issues -- while entirely understandable in short-term tactical terms -- could only exacerbate the conflict and theoretically slow progress.

It's nothing you haven't thought or read or perhaps articulated yourself, but a worthwhile reminder.

"Nestled in neighborhoods of varying degrees of affluence, suburban public schools are typically better resourced than their inner-city peers and known for their extracurricular offerings and college preparatory programs. Despite the glowing opportunities that many families associate with suburban schooling, accessing a district's resources is not always straightforward, particularly for black and poorer families."

It's one of several recent books taking a long hard look at suburban communities whose schools may not be as good (or as equitable) as may be commonly believed -- for example Amanda Lewis' With The Best Of Intentions.

Check out this fascinating American RadioWorks interview titled Race in Suburban Schools, featuring L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy talking about his look at one Midwestern suburban school district that illustrates the increasing diversity and nagging achievement gaps in the leafy burbs. One striking example Lewis-McCoy describes is how he observes white teachers hold back from correcting the grammar and speech of black and brown students to avoid stigmatizing them.

This recent New Yorker article (There Goes the Neighborhood) raises a bunch of important questions about how we think about gentrification and low-income communities that used to be commonly called "ghettos" -- and, by extension, low-income (generally low-performing) schools.

Scholars have long been sympathetic towards these communities, according to the piece:

"Scholars who studied the ghetto tended to be motivated by sympathy for its residents, which often resulted in a complicated sort of sympathy for ghettos themselves."

It could be argued that some of the same emotions have been on display when it comes to the low-income, generally low-performing school.

However public opinion has changed dramatically.

"Where the ghetto once seemed a menace, threatening to swallow the city like an encroaching desert, now it often appears, in scholarly articles and the popular press, as an endangered habitat."

The reality may be, however, that displacements from gentrification are not be as widespread as is commonly thought. That's because underlying mobility rates are already relatively high in these communities, as evictions, better opportunities, and other shifts move families in and out of low-income areas.

In addition, "Gentrification needn’t be zero-sum, because gentrifying neighborhoods may become more densely populated, with new arrivals adding to, rather than supplanting, those currently resident.

"A new study finds a program that works with at-risk young men in Chicago schools reduced overall arrests in the group by 35 percent, violent crime arrests by 50 percent and boosted on-time high school graduation for participants by 19 percent." via WTTW Chicago Public Television (Program for At-Risk Youth Cuts Arrests by 35 Percent)

Like many white people, my only experience of institutions was majority white. And so there was a learning curve for me. I was a little uncomfortable the first day of kindergarten. I saw black families – I didn’t see individuals. I saw Hispanic families … It took me a while to see past race, in a way, if that makes any sense, and to see that these were potential friends for me, these were potential allies, mom friends.

- Brooklyn parent and author Lucinda Rosenfeld, talking with WNYC's Rebecca Caroll and the NYT's Nikole Hannah-Jones at a recent panel on school segregation (What role should parents play in promoting integration?). Rosenfeld's next novel, about a white mom choosing a majority-minority school for her child, comes out early next year.

Reform critics like to talk about big social issues like poverty, or focus on reform challenges like racial segregation in charter schools, but downplay ignore structural issues in public education like school assignment policies and district boundaries.

It's not just attendance zones and school assignment policies within districts that contribute to segregation and school inequality. According to a new report from EdBuild, school district boundaries themselves play a dramatic role in "segregating communities and separating low-income kids from educational opportunity." The most vivid examples of this effect are "island" districts entirely surrounded by other school districts of vastly different means.

"The way we fund schools in the United States creates incentives for communities to segregate along socioeconomic lines in order to preserve local wealth. In so doing, communities create arbitrary borders that serve to lock students into, or out of, opportunity. This reality is especially glaring in the case of island school districts that are entirely surrounded by single districts of very different means."

While there are nearly 200 examples nationwide, the report highlights examples in Oakland, Freehold NJ, and Columbus OH.

I don’t think we could have done this if I had to answer to a school board. My superintendent colleagues spend the vast majority of their time trying to convince people to allow them to do what is good and right for kids. That’s never how I spend my time. I take great ideas to great leaders and they say yes or they say no and we keep it moving. There is no way that we could have gotten as far as we have gotten without mayoral control.

Lucinda Rosenfeld's new novel, Class, is scheduled to come out in a few months, but we're already starting to hear about it this summer.

According to the Amazon blurb, the book focuses on "idealistic forty-something Karen Kipple" who sends her kid to an integrated Brooklyn school.

"But when a troubled student from a nearby housing project begins bullying children in Ruby's class, the distant social and economic issues Karen has always claimed to care about so passionately feel uncomfortably close to home."

There aren't a lot of African Americans who live on the Upper West Side...We were sad to learn that, you know? I would like more diversity, but we chose to move to this place because we put the quality of the education at a higher value.

So I urge you A, to stop talking to the press... This is a private matter, I think, from our community. This story doesn't exist without your quotes... Be mindful of when you speak, if you're going to speak to the press, because slandering or saying anything negative about this teaching staff is wrong... Conversely, painting any opposition as classist or racist is about as bad as it can get.

"San Francisco’s Lowell High School is one of the most selective public schools in the country. But the school’s selectivity means that black and Latino students, who are often less prepared for academic rigor than Lowell’s majority-Asian students, are underrepresented." via PBS NewsHour.

Still buzzing over the Sunday Tony awards show? Me, too. Check out the show performances if you missed any here, or click the link above and watch some of the NYC high school kids who've been attending the show and performing for Lin Manuel-Miranda as part of what Scholastic's Wayne D'Orio dubbed "Hamilton 101." It's pretty cool to watch them. The video is about a half-hour long.

Here's an hourlong panel from this year's recent NSVF Summit addressing the gap between the idea of diversity and making it happen. The topic seems especially timely given this last weekend's NYT Sunday Magazine article about how individual parent decisions cumulatively reinforce residential segregation and school assignment policies.

"Eight graduates from Renaissance Academy give recollections for the bittersweet finish to a difficult year. Three students were killed, including one who was attacked while in the school and later died from the injuries." Mantra for graduates of troubled Baltimore high school: 'You can make it' - Baltimore Sun. Watch the video, and be sure to check out the story, too.